Empire's child: Andrea Levy on Small Island

Andrea Levy started writing to unravel her family’s story: her parents coming from Jamaica to the UK, their shock on arrival and her own experience growing up here. But in her new novel she’s confronting the politics of it all, she tells Bonnie Greer

The journey to Andrea Levy's house is complicated. The taxi driver pulls over and checks his map. We're in north London, a part of town I do not know well. I check my notes: "Andrea Levy, born in 1956; father came over on the Empire Windrush in 1948; mother trained as a teacher in Jamaica; Britain's most prolific black woman novelist; stepmother to her husband's children; worked in BBC costume department; straight-talking, sometimes described as 'angry'; once read that she intends to have her portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, or else; calls herself a 'gregarious recluse'; determined."

This last is evident in all three of Levy's previous novels - Every Light In The House Burnin', Never Far From Nowhere and Fruit Of The Lemon. Each book chronicles a British black woman's journey towards herself, in a land that does not always acknowledge her existence. Levy's characters are not gloriously beautiful, deeply accomplished or utterly tragic; they live in ordinary circumstances, go about ordinary lives. We know them. They are us. Her writing is as English as Tony Parsons' or Nick Hornby's. There is no magic realism in her work - just people who, save for the accident and drama of race, would be invisible. Her prose is first-person, direct, poignant and full of sly humour. The writing is exhilarating because there are no tricks. With each novel, the authorial voice has become clearer, more defined.

"In Fruit Of The Lemon," Levy says, "there's a section where I look back at the family tree of the main protagonist, Faye. A lot of the work on that particular book was me plucking up my courage and asking my mother if she would please, please just tell me something about her childhood. I'd never done that before. That can sound very odd, but as a family we never did that. My mum agreed. We made some tapes. I thought, 'I'm on a roll here'." Levy stops and turns her sharp, dark eyes on me. "It bothers me that I have to drag my poor mum into it. It wasn't her fault that I started writing books. I do get extremely nervous and anxious that I do justice to the information given to me. I've discovered that some people are touchy about appearing in my books - you know, to take someone's childhood experience and put that into the life of someone else - but once you start publishing, you have to take your family into places they don't want to go. I know that my poor mother would like me to shut up sometimes."

Levy's latest novel, Small Island, tells the story of two couples - one black, one white - who find that Empire has forged them a common destiny. In scale, it is a departure from her previous work, and roams back and forth across time and space: the Empire Exhibition, just before the outbreak of war; Jamaica during the war; the England of the Jamaican airmen; Calcutta after VJ day; Earls Court, 1948. My own late father, an American, was stationed here as part of the D-day assault. He turned 20 the day after the landings began, and I recall him saying that he was asked if he had a tail. It is gratifying to read this same experience from the perspective of the West Indian airmen, whom he greatly admired.

"This novel feels very different to me," Levy says, serving tea in the tidy study of the home she shares with her husband, Bill, a graphic designer. "First of all, I had to tell a bigger story. I did loads of research for this book. I have enough for another. The writing took four and a half years, and I loved it. My earlier books, which I love very much, too, were much more personal stories. I feel more political now, but I had to go through the personal first. The year 1948 is becoming one of those big historical markers, which is one reason that I set Small Island in that time. Then the big documentary came out on Windrush a few years back, so I thought, 'Right, let's set it down.'

"And, at the same time, 1948 is personal. That's when my dad came over. I had been talking to my mother about her recollections, and to my husband's mother about the mining communities up north. Then I started to wonder what it would be like if those two met."

It could have gone something like this. At their first meeting in the novel, Queenie, the English farmer's daughter, contemplates Hortense, the Jamaican immigrant: "You don't see many coloured women. I'd seen old ones with backsides as big as buses but never a young one with a trim waist." Hortense on Queenie: "The Englishwoman was still looking at me when I entered the hallway. Perusing me in a fashion as if I was not there to see her stares ... I was hoping that in addressing her directly she would avert her eye from me and go about her business."

There are two rivers running through Levy's work and life. One is the theme of duality, of living two lives at the same time. The other is family, the workings of which form a bedrock in her novels. Family is both theme and metaphor - the story of the Jamaican family in London, and the metaphor of Empire, the Big Family, which turns out to be betrayer and, in some cases, destroyer.

Hortense, one of the novel's four central characters, is running away from a broken heart to a broken country. In one powerful scene, she shelters with the object of her unrequited love and a troubled white woman during a storm in Jamaica. Hortense, watching the pair, notices that "every gesture drew them together. Until the shadow of their heads took the shape of a heart on the wall. And at that moment I wanted to burst from the room, to blow through the windows, to blast through the walls. To escape into the embrace of a dependable hurricane." In coming to England, Hortense believes she is doing right, doing it the way she was brought up. All that, then to come and have someone call you "a darkie". "The way my mum talks about it," Levy says, "she really thought that she was British."

Levy's parents are, in a sense, always in her books - Winston and Beryl in her first novel, Every Light In The House Burnin', Newton and Rose in Never Far From Nowhere, Mildred and Wade in Fruit Of The Lemon. And now Hortense and Gilbert in Small Island. They are all hard-working, complex. Living in England is, for them, traumatic. This is something, Levy says, she still notices in the first generation. They continue, in her words, to "reel" from life in the mother country.

"My dad came over on the Empire Windrush. My mum came six months later. They came to a place like Earls Court in the book. This was before I was born."

There is a photograph of Levy's parents from those early days. They are effortlessly chic, confident, like two gorgeous Dior mannequins modelling the New Look; they stare into the camera with nonchalance. They seem to be dressed as they thought everyone else should, and must have brought an almost impossible beauty and refinement to a country turned upside down by war. Levy nods. "It is impossible to ignore," she points out, "that, unlike Africa and India, the Caribbean was settled. Hortense is educated to be what she is - British. She speaks a certain way, and is shocked to discover how badly Londoners comport themselves. She comes to join her husband, Gilbert, expecting a house with a lovely English garden. It was, after all, her due.

"My parents came from a class in Jamaica called 'the coloured class'. There are white Jamaicans, black Jamaicans and coloured Jamaicans. My parents' skin was light. They were mixed race, effectively. They came to Britain with a kind of notion that pigmentation represented class. They didn't necessarily have more money or education, but because they were somehow closer to being white, this was seen as a badge of pride." Levy laughs gently at this: "My parents arrived here and were surprised to discover that they were considered black. They thought that people would look at them as white. That sounds very funny now, but it can set up quite a conflict in a family. I was growing up knowing that things were so completely different. I didn't have any subtleties of shade. If someone didn't want to be my friend because I was black, that was it."

"'Black' - that word was never used in our house. If there was any racial tension, my parents would just say, 'Oh, tell them to stop being silly.' Something like that. They never once said, 'Oh, go out there, you're as good as they are.' It was always, 'Just keep your head down.'"

No matter how light-skinned her parents were, theirs was still considered the only black family on their council estate near Arsenal. When a little American girl came to their school, Levy remembers, everyone was eager to know all about her. They did not want to know about Andrea. She felt, as Gilbert in Small Island does, "How come England did not know me?"

"I get asked a lot about what I think about being black in Britain. If anyone wants to know what I think, there are the books. I'm very wary of becoming a political pundit and reducing everything to a sound bite." She pauses and slowly drinks her tea. She is ambivalent about the idea of self-promotion. "You're engrossed in the work for years, then Mammon enters. All of this talking is so unbelievably irrelevant. Somebody like Philip Larkin, for example, can I enjoy him now that I know how he thinks? But, on the other hand, I'm grateful to David Hockney, who showed us that certain Old Masters painted with mirrors, that they were human beings."

Levy has been described as "angry", but it's hard to square this with the woman who glances fondly at her latest book as if it were a child. Indeed, her books are her children. "I knew by the age of five that I didn't want to have children. I don't know why. I guess I'd rather be a father than a mother; maybe somebody can analyse that. Bill's children have been in my life since they were five and six. They're now in their 20s, but I did have that experience with them. The pram in the hall and all that. I don't know if that stops you being a writer. I don't know."

What Levy does know is that, to start with, she had no intention of becoming a writer. Yet once she decided to do it, she was "hungry, hungry, hungry". She took a course, wrote her first book, found an agent, suffered rejection, but that didn't matter. She had reached a point where she needed to read her own story, place her life and the lives of people like her into the canon. She does indeed want her portrait to hang in the National Portrait Gallery - though this is, she says, "just one of those ambitions of mine, like having my ashes scattered along Upper Street in Islington". Writing has become a way of understanding who she is, because she wasn't always sure.

"I worked once for a voluntary organisation. They were into racial awareness. We had an exercise in which we had to split into black and white, the oppressors and the oppressed. I dutifully took myself to the oppressors' side and was told that, no, I was the oppressed. This was a shock. I remember using the term 'half-caste' with someone who was doing the training. I was told right away that I shouldn't use that term, that it was a derogatory term. My learning curve was so steep I was getting bloody vertigo. I think I started writing because I have this strange schism in my life."

This notion of schism brings us back to the other river running through Levy's work, the theme of duality. The cover of Small Island is striking: two beautiful women, one white, one black, striding in opposite directions, behind them St Paul's, the divine, and the Oxo tower, the secular. Both are haughty and proud, the same height, the same size. Near them is a wall that might have been destroyed by a bomb or, alternatively, is in the process of being rebuilt.

Levy, the daughter of a twin, is both West Indian and British. In each of her novels she illuminates and works through this dual reality, the looking back and the looking forward, the old country and the new, the two notions of home, the fact of being both the child and the orphan of Empire. "When you're younger, you believe you know everything, but as you get older, you think, 'Hmmm, I don't know.' "

For me, the most poignant character in Small Island is Bernard, a "racist", a man who would never countenance black people on his premises or in his life. After the war, he returns to an England that he describes as "shrunk", where "silence was the only balm that healed". Levy draws Bernard with amazing compassion, giving this shattered man a voice. We see England through his eyes, a feat that some might criticise on the grounds that she is giving air-time to the enemy. I know - a play I wrote a few years ago, A Few White Boys Talking, was not reviewed by the Voice newspaper. I was left with the feeling that I had committed a grave offence against the black community by even writing a play with white people in it, let alone allowing them to speak about the world as they saw it. Levy goes much further than I did: she turns Bernard into a tragic anti-hero in the classic mode. Of all the characters in the novel, says Levy, Bernard is "the one who went through a lot. When you think now how we 'police' trauma, men like Bernard had nothing at all. You come back and you're not important any more, because whatever you were out there, you were certainly important. That coming back and feeling a kind of redundancy must have been hard."

I call myself a black woman writer because "black" and "woman" are the two lenses through which I explore myself and the rest of my fellow human beings. But sometimes if you use that term, other, often younger, black writers consider it to be a kind of ghettoisation. For me, it is just the opposite - it gives me a pathway into the great stream of human history. I have within my grasp Hamlet's "undiscover'd country", which is not death, but another way of writing about life. Black women and our lives is the story that I mine over and over again, in different media and in different ways. To me, every good writer is really only telling one story.

Levy agrees: "It's so hard to put into one sentence," she says. "In the end, the whole process is about trying to understand. For instance, I just wanted to understand Bernard and Queenie. I want to understand why my parents came to this country, and who they were back in that country. I'm still on that quest. Because no one else is going to tell it."

· Small Island, by Andrea Levy, is published on Monday by Review at £14.99. To order a copy for the special price of £12.99 (plus UK p&p), call the Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979.